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After fleeing Hong Kong in 1962, Chen Qiao photographed a couple crying and breaking up at Hua Shan in Sheung Shui. The husband, Yip Yat-yin, was a worker in Hong Kong, and the wife brought her two children to Hong Kong for reunion. In the end, his wife was left back to the mainland. (Photo source: Photo by Chen Qiao, used with permission from the South China Morning Post.)
In Shenzhen at that time, there was a folk song like this: “There are only three treasures in Baoan, flies, mosquitoes, and manhole oysters. Nine out of ten houses fled to Hong Kong, and only the old and the young were left in the family.” Behind the ballad, there is a group of people. Stunning numbers. According to the information Chen Bing’an has, in the documents currently available, since the phenomenon of fleeing from Hong Kong began to appear in 1955, there have been a total of four large-scale waves of fleeing from Hong Kong in Shenzhen’s history, namely in 1957, 1962, and 1972. and 1979, a total of 560,000 people (times); participants came from 12 provinces and 62 cities (counties) across the country, including Guangdong, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Guangxi.
Most of those who fled Hong Kong were farmers, but also included some urban residents, students, educated youth, workers, and even soldiers. In terms of political composition, most of them are ordinary people, but there are also members of the Communist Youth League, Communist Party members, and even CCP cadres. Data from Shenzhen City shows that by 1978, a total of 557 cadres in the city had participated in fleeing Hong Kong, and 183 had escaped; 40 cadres at or above the deputy section level of municipal government agencies had fled.
There are three ways to escape from Hong Kong: walking, swimming, and taking a boat. According to the route, there are east line, middle line and west line. Swimming is usually the first choice. Stowaways often choose the western route, that is, starting from Shekou and the mangrove area and swimming through Shenzhen Bay. If everything goes well, they can swim to Yuen Long in the northwest New Territories of Hong Kong in about an hour. Cantonese people call this kind of smuggling by water “du pawn”, borrowing the chess terminology, which means “there is no return”. In the memories of many locals, reservoirs and rivers are overcrowded in summer. Many children have been taught by their families since childhood, “Practice swimming well and go to Hong Kong in the future.”
Stowaways usually carry car tires or life preservers, foam plastics and other life-saving tools. At that time, the above-mentioned items were strictly controlled items. Later, even table tennis became one of them. Because the border guards discovered that some people even strung hundreds of ping pong balls together as life-saving tools. After all, swimming is what young people do. Middle-aged and elderly people, children and women usually choose to cross the border illegally by land, from Wutongshan and Shatoujiao in Shenzhen, to climb over the border barbed wire fence, which is jokingly known as “fighting the net” in Cantonese. In order to avoid police dogs, some Hong Kong escapees will go to the zoo to bribe the zookeepers before leaving, find some tiger feces, and scatter them as they walk. The police dogs will smell the smell of the feces and will not dare to follow them.
There are three ways to escape from Hong Kong: walking, swimming, and taking a boat. (Picture source: Internet picture)
At that time, the crackdown on stowaways was extremely harsh. Anyone who goes to Hong Kong without legal procedures will be regarded as “treason and surrender to the enemy” and will be detained if caught. The border guards are the biggest obstacle to stowaways. Before the 1960s, border guards could shoot at any time when they encountered stowaways who disobeyed orders. Many stowaways were killed on the beach and in the mountains. Since then, due to strict orders from superiors, the phenomenon of shooting has gradually disappeared. This extremely risky trend of fleeing Hong Kong has also given birth to a new profession – “cadaver pulling”. At its peak, there were more than 200 corpse-pullers active in Shenzhen. In the late 1970s, Shenzhen Shekou Maritime Police Station once stipulated that for every time a corpse puller buried a body of a stowaway, he could go to the Shekou Commune with a certificate to receive a labor fee of 15 yuan. Chen Bingan once interviewed an old man who was a “corpse puller”. The old man told him that the most he received in one day was 750 yuan from the commune, and that among the 50 corpses he buried, 4 were his relatives.
In some places, there are even forced clearances. According to Baoan County Party Committee’s “Report on the Situation of the Work to Stop Mass Flows from Hong Kong” and other documents, in 1962, a severe famine occurred in Guangdong, and a large number of residents fled to Hong Kong. On the road that stretches for more than 100 miles from east to west in Bao’an County, expatriates gathered in groups, supporting the elderly and the young, like “an army heading south with great force.” These stowaways came in groups, each carrying a wooden stick more than 4 feet long. The leading smuggler publicly said: “Whoever obstructs us, we will fight them with wooden sticks and rush over. Even if we shoot, we will not retreat!”
Due to the mass exodus, many villages in Shenzhen are “empty”. In 1971, the Baoan County Public Security Bureau wrote in its “Year-End Report Outline” to its superiors that many villages such as Dawangqian, Malihe, Enshang, Niujingwo, Luzui, and Dashukeng had become “uninhabited villages.” “, one village escaped with only one cripple left. In order to accommodate captured stowaways, the local government has built more than a hundred new shelters, but they are often overcrowded.
In those days, smuggling was an open secret. If someone successfully smuggles someone into a family, the family will not only avoid suspicion, but will show off in front of outsiders, and some meddlesome people will hold a feast and set off firecrackers to celebrate. In the Shawan Brigade in Panyu, Guangzhou, there was also a smuggling incident involving the production team leader and the party branch secretary and security director. When they fled, dozens of villagers even went to the beach to bid farewell to them. The Xincun Fishery Brigade of Huiyang Aotou Commune has a total of just over 560 people, and 112 people were successfully smuggled into the country in just a few months. Of the six branch members of the brigade’s party branch, except for one female committee member, the other five were smuggled to Hong Kong.
Chen Bing’an once met a legendary figure among Hong Kong escapees. This person was caught smuggling 12 times, setting a record. By the 13th time, the border guards looked familiar to him and were too embarrassed to arrest him again, so he successfully escaped to Hong Kong. Most of the battlegrounds, the bastion of socialist education, and the anti-smuggling “red flag village” were escaped.
Chen Bingan, a fugitive from Hong Kong. (Picture source: Internet picture)
Why flee to Hong Kong? Chen Bingan has asked many people this question and received various answers. The main reasons are poverty and famine.
In 1957, rural collectivization was further upgraded. The Baoan County Party Committee passed the “Several Regulations on Restricting the Development of Rural Capitalism”, which restricts members’ private land and sideline income. Sideline income cannot exceed 30% of the family’s total annual income; farmers outside the cooperative are not allowed to open up wasteland or abandon farming for business. Completely plug the loopholes of capitalism”; the “all-male labor force” must complete 260 working days a year; if farmers have gold and silver jewelry in their homes, they must report it to the government and then take it into state ownership.
By 1959, there was a severe famine in Guangdong. One data shows that the province’s total grain output that year was only 17.758 billion kilograms, a decrease of 15.71% from 1958. 1960 was still a year of production reduction, and farmers actually harvested 6.125 billion kilograms less grain than usual, which was equivalent to 8 Month’s rations. A refugee from Hong Kong told Chen Bingan that at that time, there was basically no meat or oil in the food, and even vegetables were rare. In order to relieve his hunger, he once ate banana residue, straw, papaya peels, sweet potato vines, and even Guanyin soil at one time. At that time, the average daily income of a farmer in Baoan was about 70 cents, while the average daily income of farmers in Hong Kong was 70 Hong Kong dollars, a gap of nearly 100 times. A local folk song goes: “Working hard for a year is not as good as paying 8 cents across the street” (referring to sending a letter to Hong Kong to ask relatives to remit money back).
Political persecution is also one of the main reasons for fleeing Hong Kong.
The famous musician Ma Sicong is the most typical representative. After the “Cultural Revolution” began in 1966, Ma Sicong, then president of the Central Conservatory of Music, suffered a lot of humiliation. In 1967, he took the opportunity to perform in Shenzhen, took a desperate risk, and fled to Hong Kong by boat. The day after he arrived in Hong Kong, newspapers and radio stations across Hong Kong reported the news, setting off a 10-year wave of people fleeing Hong Kong, with intellectuals and educated youth as the main body.
Ma Sicong (the above are all online pictures)
Chen Bing’an once interviewed a militia captain. The reason why he fled Hong Kong sounds incredible today. The militia captain found a balloon floating from Taiwan in the mountains. In the basket under the balloon, there were a lot of food and a white vest. In the era when the two sides of the Taiwan Strait were in a state of hostility, balloons like this were often found in Guangdong. The educated youth handed over the food, but he really couldn’t bear to part with the white vest, so he secretly kept it. A few days later, he attended a basketball game wearing a white vest. Onlookers discovered that after the white vest was soaked with sweat, the words “Counterattack the Mainland” appeared on the back. As a result, this farmer, who was originally a “rooted and prosperous” farmer, was labeled as a “American and Chiang Kai-shek agent”. He was severely persecuted and had to flee to Hong Kong.
In order to cope with the increasingly severe wave of people fleeing Hong Kong, the local government has thought of such a method. On Wutong Mountain, where people fled to Hong Kong, there was a village called Xikeng. Baoan County was determined to “launch a desperate struggle” here and build Xikeng Village into an “anti-smuggling red flag village.”
There was an upsurge in studying Chairman Mao’s works in the village. The walls in front of and behind the village are covered with large slogans: “Hold high the great red flag of Mao Zedong Thought and march forward bravely!” A quotation board with the slogan “Grasp the revolution and promote production” is also placed beside the well in the field. As soon as it gets dark, the villagers are organized to sing. Most of the songs are “Sailing the Sea Depends on the Helmsman”, “Chairman Mao’s Books I Favoritely Read”, etc. For a time, Xikeng Village became a famous “red flag” in Bao’an County and even Guangdong Province. People came here in an endless stream to visit and study every day, and they stepped on a path on the barren hills outside the village. But it didn’t take long for this carefully constructed “fortress of socialist education” to collapse. In 1973, most of the young adults in Xikeng Village, including anti-flight activists and militia cadres, fled to Hong Kong. The oldest “man” left behind by one group was an 8-year-old boy. A peasant woman who fled to Hong Kong even left this sentence: “After I die, don’t even blow my ashes back here!” The real miracle of Hong Kong is that those of us who risked our lives to go to Liangshan, with blood and tears, The attitude of the British Hong Kong authorities towards those who fled Hong Kong has also gone through several stages.
The Hong Kong government mobilized thousands of military police and began large-scale expulsions and arrests. At the same time, more than 100,000 Hong Kong citizens rushed to Huashan with food and drinking water to protect these escapees. According to subsequent statistics, about half of the people who fled Hong Kong fled into the city under the cover of citizens.
Many Hong Kong police officers could not bear to arrest these people. Some police officers even disobeyed orders and hugged and cried with those who fled Hong Kong.
Finally, under the instruction of “Those who do not take action will be disobedient”, the police finally began to carry out the order and forcibly dragged these escapees to hundreds of cars that had been prepared at the foot of the mountain, preparing to be sent back to the mainland the next day.
That night, almost all entertainment venues in Hong Kong automatically turned off their lights and closed their doors in protest. Almost all media stopped entertainment programs, and many radio stations began to broadcast the situation in Huashan live.
The next day, when hundreds of cars lined up in a long queue and slowly drove inland, a jaw-dropping scene unfolded. Hundreds of Hong Kong citizens suddenly jumped into the street, lying on the ground and blocking cars. The crowd roared: “Hurry up and jump out of the car!” According to subsequent statistics, nearly a thousand more people fleeing Hong Kong fled the scene under the cover of surrounding Hong Kong citizens.
Among the dozens of Hong Kong escapees interviewed by Chen Bingan who later had successful careers in Hong Kong, almost everyone experienced similar difficult moments. They started from the bottom of society, were looked down upon, and worked hard. Not only did they slowly integrate into mainstream society, but they also created many “wealth myths.”
Someone once made statistics and found that among the top 100 richest people in Hong Kong at the end of the last century, more than 40 of them fled Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s. Among them are Zeng Xianzi, chairman of the board of directors of Goldlion Group, Jimmy Lai, chairman of Next Media Group, and Liu Mengxiong, the “godfather of futures”. Not only that, Hong Kong cultural elites such as the famous writer Ni Kuang, the “godfather of the music industry” Luo Wen, and the “gold medal screenwriter” Liang Liren were also among those who fled Hong Kong.
Editor in charge: Fu Longshan
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